Composted manure is the gardener's best friend

GARDEN Fertile and organic, composted manure is the gardener's best friend

Novella Carpenter, Special to The Chronicle

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, February 20, 2011

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

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Company head Teddy Stray (left) and director of operations Robert Fontanilla (right) on top of finished compost for Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif. They make their compost from manure coming from organically raised cows. These cows also provide milk for Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese. less

Company head Teddy Stray (left) and director of operations Robert Fontanilla (right) on top of finished compost for Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif. They make their compost from manure coming ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

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Jen Cantwell of Mama's Worm Composting poses on one of three windrows of horse manure at her indoor worm farm in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, February 12, 2011.

Jen Cantwell of Mama's Worm Composting poses on one of three windrows of horse manure at her indoor worm farm in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, February 12, 2011.

Photo: Thomas Levinson, The Chronicle

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Jen Cantwell shows off just a handful of her millions of worms at Mama's Worm Composting, her indoor worm farm in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, February 12, 2011.

Jen Cantwell shows off just a handful of her millions of worms at Mama's Worm Composting, her indoor worm farm in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, February 12, 2011.

Photo: Thomas Levinson, The Chronicle

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Teddy Stray and his company, Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., take thermometer readings of two week old raw manure.

Teddy Stray and his company, Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., take thermometer readings of two week old raw manure.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

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Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., make their compost from manure coming from organically raised cows. These cows also provide milk for Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese.

Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., make their compost from manure coming from organically raised cows. These cows also provide milk for Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

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Jen Cantwell shows off just a couple handfuls of her millions of worms at Mama's Worm Composting, her indoor worm farm in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, February 12, 2011.

Jen Cantwell shows off just a couple handfuls of her millions of worms at Mama's Worm Composting, her indoor worm farm in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, February 12, 2011.

Photo: Thomas Levinson, The Chronicle

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Manure coming through the separator at Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., as they make their compost from manure coming from organically raised cows.

Manure coming through the separator at Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., as they make their compost from manure coming from organically raised cows.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

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Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., make their compost from manure coming from organically raised cows. These cows also provide milk for Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese. They are on a strict diet from a nutritionist. less

Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., make their compost from manure coming from organically raised cows. These cows also provide milk for Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese. They are on a strict diet ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

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Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., make their compost from manure coming from organically raised dairy cows. The separator (behind) removes excess moisture from manure on Wednesday, February 9, 2011, where the spillage (front) goes to a methane digestor, and the first pile of compost (mound, behind) is ready to go through several stages before completion. The methane digester produces enough energy to run 75 percent of the dairy operations. less

Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif., make their compost from manure coming from organically raised dairy cows. The separator (behind) removes excess moisture from manure on Wednesday, February 9, ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

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Director of operations Robert Fontanilla (left) and company head Teddy Stray (right) with their packaged compost from Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif. The silage grass in the background is part of the main diet for their cows. They make their compost from manure coming from organically raised cows. These cows also provide milk for Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese. less

Director of operations Robert Fontanilla (left) and company head Teddy Stray (right) with their packaged compost from Point Reyes Compost Co., in Point Reyes, Calif. The silage grass in the background is part ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

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Composted manure is the gardener's best friend

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I'm a poo chaser. You see, I have a number of animals in my Oakland backyard - a pair of Nigerian dwarf goats and a herd of rabbits - that spend an inordinate amount of time making poo. Every week, I shovel load after load of goat berries and rabbit pellets into my wheelbarrow, and you know what? I find myself smiling. Don't get me wrong - it's backbreaking, dirty, smelly work - but the gardener in me can't help loving turd duty because the manure I collect makes my vegetable and fruit garden incredibly productive and healthy.

Gardeners are always on the quest for fertility. It's in our blood, this search for nutrients, which will then grow big, healthy crops of broccoli and lemons, apples and potatoes.

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If you are an urban farmer like me, space is limited, so crops are grown intensively - broccoli right next to cilantro, closely sown lettuce seeds for cut-and-come-again harvesting, apple trees planted a few feet from plum trees.

The secret to keeping these intensively grown vegetables and fruits healthy and productive is manure. It's an organic way to get nutrients into the soil without using synthetic fertilizers.

Composted manures naturally slow-release nutrients to growing plants while building soil structure, and increasing water-holding capacity of vegetable beds. But first you have to get a manure connection.

I know that not everyone can have their own goats and rabbits. Luckily, there's Craigslist, which has all manner of free manure postings. The best manures to use in the garden are rabbit, goat, horse, dairy cow and sheep. Since the animals are herbivores who mostly eat hay and grass, their manure isn't prone to pathogens like those of chickens and pigs.

Make sure the manure is composted, or have a plan to compost it by adding carbonaceous material like straw, dried leaves or wood shavings to the manure, at a ratio of 30:1. Turn the composting manure and carbon every so often, and harvest the resulting soil after a few months.

Help for non-DIYers

If DIY composting isn't your thing, there are a number of businesses whose main mission is providing manure to the masses. One is Mama's Worm Composting in West Oakland, just down the street from my house.

I rode over to the warehouse where the worms are being grown and found Jen Cantwell, knee deep in horse manure.

"This is it - 60 tons of horse poop," she said, a petite blonde standing next to three 20-by-5-foot berms of manure.

With her pitchfork she dug into one of the berms. "Watch it as it cracks, and you can see them all." I see a wriggling mass of red spaghetti: worms. Red wigglers, Eisenia fetida.

Cantwell started her business in 2009. "I was on an eco-kick," she said, "and I was trying to do one green thing every day. Worms were one of them." She was living in a condo and wanted to start composting her kitchen scraps, so she ordered some worms through the mail.

"When I first saw them, they freaked me out, and I threw the box away from me," she said.

Now Jen and the worms are in business together. The worms live in and eat the horse manure, then, after about four weeks, Jen harvests the worms and their castings (a polite word for worm poo).

To do so, she puts them through a trammel screen harvester, which separates the worms from their castings. The worms are gathered to be sold for $20 per pound at garden centers around the Bay Area. The castings are bagged and sold as a concentrated soil amendment to be sprinkled onto garden beds.

As Cantwell showed me around and I soaked up the faint smell of horse manure, I thought about how all small family farms used to grow vegetables and animals together in a closed cycle of interdependence.

It's only lately that we've become specialists - horse people or vegetable farmers. Before all the specialization, the land used to feed the animals, and then animal manures went back to the land, in a perfect cycle.

These days, manure is considered a waste product in large dairy and pig operations. Instead of spreading the manure on the fields, it is contained in smelly lagoons, which often overflow and pollute the groundwater.

"It's not that the manure isn't valuable; the lagoons are bioproducts of how the big dairies clean their manure. First of all, there is a large concentration of animals; too many animals in one place, so there's not enough land to spread the manure, like people used to do. And the way they clean the dairies, using water to flush the manure instead of shoveling, creates the lagoons. The watery manure is then too wet and heavy to distribute."

Stray welcomed me at the farmhouse, a beautiful affair nestled in the middle of 780 of the greenest acres I have ever seen, right next to Tomales Bay.

A former corporate vice president, Stray found himself at a crossroads two years ago. With the recession raging, he was looking for a new field to get into. Luckily, his father-in-law was Giacomini.

"I told Bob that we were going to put his s- in a bag and sell it," Stray said, standing next to a dozen curious black-and-white dairy cows. "Bob told me I shouldn't quit my day job."

But in June 2009, Point Reyes Compost Co. was born, with Stray at the helm, and his friend Robert Fontanilla as director of operations.

Bob's Best lesson

Stray and Fontanilla drove me around the farm to see how the composted cow manure - called Bob's Best - is made. We started in what they call the commodities barn, where a nutritionist-formulated mix of organic cottonseed, rice meal and silage (hay grown on the ranch) is tossed together and then fed to the 350 head of dairy cows. Then we moved on to the milk barn, where the cows are milked twice a day. A steady trickle of greenish-brown effluvia streamed from the barn.

"We call this S- Creek," Fontanilla joked. But instead of going directly into a lagoon, this combo of urine, water and manure goes into a giant device called the Separator.

Solids are ground up and fall into a pile, and the wet stuff goes into a capped lagoon for methane capture, which generates 50 to 80 kilowatts per day - enough to run 85 percent of the farm's entire operation. Another lagoon is pumped in order to irrigate and fertilize the farm's 150 acres of silage. Stray's interest lies in the pile gathering under the Separator.

"We get 6 to 10 yards of fresh manure a day," Stray said, picking up a shovel and showing what the manure looks like after passing through the Separator. There's surprisingly little odor, and the pieces of manure are uniform.

From the Separator, the manure is moved into giant piles, 5 feet wide and 5 feet tall, running the length of three football fields. These piles, or windrows, allow for efficient breakdown.

As the manure breaks down into soil, it is turned six to 10 times to make sure the process is oxygenated, and thus not smelly. Fontanilla sticks a large thermometer into one of the decomposing piles: 140 degrees. It's hot to the touch.

After the manure is broken down and is a stable 132 degrees for two-plus weeks, Stray puts the compost through rigorous testing for proper nutrient levels, and testing for pathogens. Then he bags it up and sells it.

A light touch

The bags - which are sold at Bay Area nurseries and the Marin Farmers' Market - are funny: On one end, it reads "full of crap"; in another spot is their motto: "Don't let anyone else give you crap!" It sums up their approach to the business: fun and playful.

After the tour, over plates of their famous Point Reyes Blue and Toma cheeses, Stray and his wife, Lynn, explain their philosophy about using all the so-called waste products of the farm.

"My dad's been doing this for 50 years - before organic or sustainability were on the map," Lynn said, "He did it because he was being a good steward of the land, and it's also better business to do things like rotational grazing and manure separation. It's more economical to use all the resources on the farm, to diversify."

Next on the horizon for Stray is to start making different blends from other kinds of manures. He's been talking with all the local ranchers - like Liberty Ducks and rabbit raisers Devil's Gulch - about getting their manure to turn into compost.

He and Fontanilla are about to open their own retail spot in Point Reyes Station, called, affectionately, the S- Shack, where they'll sell bulk quantities of Bob's Best.

As I drove away from the dazzling Tomales Bay, the taste of blue cheese on my tongue, I thought about how the Giacomini farm has retained the ideals of a small family farm: self-sufficiency, employment of family members and reusing all the farm's resources to create a smaller carbon footprint.

They have a closed system, although it's not entirely closed - we, the public, the urban farmers and growers, are being invited to join the family and all the crap that goes along with that.

Using manure

Once you score your manure, now - late winter - is a great time to begin amending your beds in anticipation of the spring and summer growing season. If you have established beds that have good soil structure, you can simply top-dress them with a couple inches of composted manure. If your soil is not vibrant and alive, it's best to work the composted manure in to the existing soil.

Use caution, though, if the manure doesn't come from a trusted source or there's some question about the ratio between nitrogen and carbon; soil scientist Lynne Carpenter-Boggs suggests using an indicator plant. Take some of the compost, mix it with a bit of sand, and sow a few peas or beans in a pot. If the peas come up healthy and green, the compost is probably the right balance of nutrients and doesn't contain any persistent contaminants, so it can be used in the rest of your garden.